The hurricane decoder: inside the mind of Charles Watson

Charles Watson's background reads like a Tom Clancy
novel. Straight out of college, where he studied electrical
engineering and geophysics, he worked with both the US Air Force
and Darpa (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). In the 80s,
he ran secure satellite communications in the Middle East under
Donald Rumsfeld, and during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he was among
the first to capture footage of burning oilfields.

Watson's not in the spook business anymore. These
days, he does something a little different.

If a storm starts brewing in the Caribbean or a tsunami approaches Japan, Watson knows where it's going to hit,
how bad it's going to be and how much it's all going to cost. It's
called hazard modelling, and in a world where climate change is on
everyone's lips, it's more important than ever.

"It's a complex area that involves engineering and
physics and science and even gets into the dark sciences of
economics and statistics," says Watson. "Much less the completely
voodoo science of meteorology."

In many ways, the skills Watson learned in
intelligence gathering have translated rather well to reading
disasters. His company is called Kinetic Analysis Corporation, where
he's chief of research and development. Their clients range from
government agencies and insurers to disaster planning organisations
and, in one case, The Hollywood
Reporter. (He and his colleague Sara Jupin were asked to
work out just how much damage would have been caused if the battle
scenes of the Avengers film occurred in real life.
Apparently, the Chitauri invasion comes with a bill of $160
billion.) He also regularly blogs about his work on the WTC Hazards Research blog.
Tagline? "You're doomed. Here's why."

To work out what a hurricane is going to do, you need
data. Lots of it. Watson uses satellite imagery from Nasa's Aqua
and Terra satellites to track everything from vegetation patterns
to ocean currents. Then, he takes economic data from places like
Eurostat and the Bureau of Economic Statistics: this lets him know
what the human presence is in any given area, and what the
infrastructure looks like. Watson takes all this, and feeds it into
a piece of software called the Multi Hazard Parallel Risk
Evaluation System. MPRES is Watson's code-breaking machine. Along
with other programs, it lets Kinetic work out the damage and costs
of any natural event on the planet.

It also takes some serious computing power to run.
"We toss multi-terabyte databases around like they're thumb
drives," says Watson. "Our systems generate roughly a terabyte of
data a day just asking: what's the Earth like right now? You have
to know what it's like right now to forecast what it's going to be
like in the next day or next year."

Kinetic's data helped the Pacific Disaster Centre (PDC) track and analyse Typhoon
Bopha as it swept through the Philippines. According to PDC deputy
executive director Chris Chiesa, Kinetic's data might not have been
able to stop the typhoon, but it certainly helped know where to
focus relief efforts in the aftermath.

"The overall forecast of the storm tells us where
it's going to and where the eye is, but we know that people get
impacted for many kilometres on either side," Chiesa says.
"Kinetic's data gave us a good estimation of how many people were
going to be in that swathe. Models like that help us work out how
far that wind damage goes."

Vaughn Jensen, head of catastrophe management
services at insurers Willis Re, says that Kinetic's damage
estimates helped them prepare for Hurricane Sandy, which hit the
east coast of the USA in November. "We used Kinetic's storm surge
footprint information to be able to help us understand what the
potential losses could be," Jensen says. "We don't rely on that
estimate solely... but we do use it as another data point."

The biggest problem Watson faces isn't from nature:
it's from humans. In the past, he's publicly criticised local
authorities for their failure in disaster planning. The Long Island
Power Authority, he says, ignored his 2006 assessment of their
electrical systems; when Hurricane Sandy hit, much of the area was
left without power. "There's no such thing as a natural disaster.
There are only natural events that become disasters because we're
morons," says Watson.

"Ignorance is increasingly not a good excuse. We know
where storms go. Our models are pretty decent -- they're not
perfect, but we got the water levels for Sandy within about a foot
and a half... Sandy caused about $25 to $28 billion (£15 to £17
billion) in real damage. For less than $3 billion (£1.9 billion),
if that had been spent over the past ten years, that damage would
have been cut down probably into the $5 billion (£3 billion)
range."

And if any aliens invade? "We can probably work out
the damage estimates for that."